Magnifying atoms by over 100 million times, this remarkable film uses individual molecules to create a short story of A Boy and His Atom: The World’s Smallest Movie.

Part art project and part guerrilla marketing for IBM, which is exploring atoms as the smallest possible units of data storage, the tale is relatively simple, but the scale is beyond belief.

This stop-motion flick involves moving atoms frame by frame, then taking images of each state, much like claymation or other similar kinds of animation.

While the results may look low-tech, they show off just how much control we can have over moving parts at the tiniest of levels, with implications for and beyond the world of computing and data storage.

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It should come as no surprise that we’re pretty big fans of tech-heavy art. Terri Timely and Park Pictures created this seriously amazing short film that warps reality to the point of complete nonsense.

Input/Output uses clever graphics to manipulate mundane scenes. Instead of a milkshake being slurped up, the glass it’s in disappears instead. Rather than dispensing paste, a toothpaste tube shoots gas and fire.

We love the total absurdity of the images – but even more so, we love how beautifully and seamlessly the filmmakers brought the images together. It’s the sometimes-unexpected ridiculousness of life that makes our days happy.

The post Hysterically Weird Short Video is Masterfully Mind Melting first appeared on Gajitz.

Drawing with a pen and paper is hard enough (unless you count those little hearts with smiley faces that we put on all of our memos), but drawing with nothing but sound just seems crazy. Jerobeam Fenderson accomplished a surprisingly awesome work of art using nothing more than sound waves and an old analog Tektronix oscilloscope.

Fenderson uses two channels from his audio interface – left and right – to create waveforms, otherwise known as sounds. He feeds the sounds into his oscilloscope, where one channel causes horizontal deflection and the other causes vertical deflection. Using some math and seriously impressive skills, he turns the sounds into pictures. Dancing pictures. Of mushrooms.

As can probably be expected, Fenderson has received plenty of emails telling him that his awesome project must be faked. However, he offers up complete details as well as a WAV file for other people to try it out. He hasn’t yet drawn an oscilloscope on mushrooms, which is apparently another frequently asked question on his site, but welcomes pictures from anyone who does manage it.

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Modern animation is pretty incredible. It’s getting close to being indistinguishable from actual film thanks to advanced computer graphics and futuristic techniques. French artist Julien Maire is taking animation back a few decades to a kind of nostalgic stop-motion era with the short film “Relief.”

Instead of drawings on pieces of film, Relief features tiny translucent resin figurines on a conveyor belt. The 3D figures roll around the belt with a light illuminating one at a time against a projector screen.

As they roll around the belt, the small figures act out a scene of a man digging a hole and then putting the dirt back into the hole. A total of 85 tiny men rotate around and around, eternally taking dirt out and putting it back in. Their never-ending labor is a unique combination of low-tech – stop animation – and high-tech – 3D printing.

Relief isn’t just a movie to be watched on the projector screen; it’s an experience that encompasses the entire humming machine and each tiny, 3D-printed little character that casts its individual shadow. The stop-motion shadow show was built while Maire was doing a manufacturing residency at the iMAL Center for Digital Cultures and Technology in Brussels.

The post Stop-Motion Film Composed of Rotating 3D Miniature Men first appeared on Gajitz.

If you believe Benjamin Franklin, there are only two concrete absolutes in life: death and taxes. But apparently hydra, the tiny freshwater animals, decided that since they don’t have to pay taxes they might as well do away with the whole death thing, too. Hydra have been studied for their amazing regenerative properties for more than 200 years, but it wasn’t until the late 1990s that someone tried to measure the animal’s natural lifecycle.

That someone was Daniel E. Martinez, a young scientist in New York. He collected a sample group of hydra from a pond and kept them fed and happy for long past the time a scientist would expect them to expire. But curiously, even after four years the hydra were still alive. That might not sound like a very long time, but for a creature that spawns within days of its own birth it is remarkably long. Unheard of, in fact.

Martinez wrote a well-regarded paper on the hydra phenomenon which was published in 1998. Recently, NPR science correspondents Robert Krulwich and Adam Cole teamed up to tell the hydra’s story in a fun video. In just over four minutes, they lay out the story of the hydra and its incredible ability to regenerate its cells over and over. This tiny freshwater creature defies everything we thought we knew about natural lifecycles – so could it be the key to discovering our own immortality?

The post The Long Haul: Freshwater Animal is as Good as Immortal first appeared on Gajitz.